Governments, agencies, and/or other authorities typically impose taxes on fuel use, such as gasoline, to cover the construction and maintenance of roads. Although this may have been sufficient in the past, the increasing popularity of electric vehicles may make this method of payment obsolete. More specifically, as charging electric vehicles at home or elsewhere gains popularity, taxes on fuel may become insufficient to pay for road use, and taxes on electricity may be considered unfair for those who use electricity but do not have electric vehicles. Determining actual road use and imposing taxes and/or tolls accordingly may be a more equitable solution. To determine actual road use, tolling techniques may be considered.
While traditional techniques of tolling may be sufficient for determining road use on a single highway, they may be impractical for determining all road use of a vehicle. Current tolling for road use is typically done utilizing roadside infrastructure, such as cameras and/or other sensors/detectors equipped to identify passing vehicles driving along a road. But equipping all roads with such roadside infrastructure would be enormously expensive, thereby making this approach impractical in most circumstances.
An alternative approach is to use “self-reporting” techniques in which a device located in the vehicle reports the usage of the vehicle to a tolling authority (e.g., government agency, etc.). However, because self-reporting solutions involve devices located in the vehicle that impact the amount of money owed by the driver of the vehicle, these self-reporting solutions are wrought with fraud. The driver of the vehicle may tamper with a device by, for example, covering the device's GPS antenna in tin/aluminum foil so that it is unable to determine the location of the vehicle, preventing the device from providing reliable information to a tolling authority. Accordingly, new systems, methods, devices, and other techniques are needed.